Today, a variety of books and novels are offered as audiobooks that are typically narrated by a professional narrator, well-known actor/actress and the like. However, a significant number of books and other text material is not available in audiobook format. More recently, automated solutions have been offered to convert text to speech. Automated text to speech converters are useful in situations where a user wants to listen to a book that is not available in audiobook format.
However, conventional automated text to speech converters suffer certain limitations. For example, with fictional books, the quality of the text to speech conversion is limited. Also, with professionally narrated books, the narrators can provide unique voices for each character in a novel. However, conventional automated text to speech converters produce common a computer generated voice for all characters when reading a book. The computer generated voice affords a poor substitution for a professional voice actor. For example, in-home digital personal assistants are capable of reading novels aloud. However, the quality of the voice narration is severely limited.
A need remains for improved methods, devices and computer program products that generate audio renderings from textual content.